Monday, October 26, 2015

I have a few Pico Iyer books. They are interesting and well-written explorations of movement, and the edges of the world, and the pull of home.
I enjoyed this Ted Talk where Pico starts with the simple question: "Where do you come from?"

I've blogged many times before here and elsewhere about the cultural geography of food.This Telegraph article provides some useful background on the history of fish and chips, which many associate with being our national dish.
Every village deserves to have a decent chippy, and I'm glad to say that we have one where I live.

Every now and again, I start a new blog on a particular theme as an extra place to share specific
resources and ideas.This new blog will share my ideas on geography in / on film....

I'll share memories of particular films from the past, preview films that are coming up, talk about films I've seen recently, and explore their geographical significance.
Geography is tied in with all films: they are set somewhere, and their narrative is driven by characters engaging with places, and their own interconnections.
Each image in a film has been carefully chosen, and may appear on screen for just a short time, but linger in the memory for a lot longer.

I'll explore film posters and the landscapes they show, cultural geography in films, how cities and the rural landscape are (re)presented in film, film soundtracks and the stories that the films were based on, or the new worlds that they open up. I'll explore how maps feature, and where films are located in specific locations.Check it out at Geography 24 times a second

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Back in July 1985, shortly after graduating (which makes me feel old), I went to Doncaster to visit my friend and contemporary Conor (now an award-winning author and Professor of Medieval History) and we went to the nearby cinema to see a movie about a character travelling backwards 30 years in time and then forward 30 years at the very end.
His time machine was a de Lorean car, and the date that he travelled to in the future will be reached next week...

Back to the Future day is October the 21st.

A few teachers on Twitter have been considering what they might do to mark this in lessons. I'm not quite sure what to do yet, and may actually run out of time to plan anything other than wear a gilet.... which isn't too creative.
That time is actually the very end of the school day, so I may just play the theme tune as students leave, or perhaps try to hide the flux capacitor into as many PPT slides as possible... or something else completely...

Saturday, October 3, 2015

It is written by Richard Phillips, Professor of Human Geography from Sheffield University, who was on the ALCAB (the 'A' level Content Advisory Board) and so was probably partly 'responsible' in some ways for the topic ending up on the new specification. It's also a topic that the awarding bodies have struggled to capture in a way that OFQUAL will accept is suitably rigorous.PDF download from the above link

The introduction discusses an injunction by Georges Perec to ‘see more flatly’ (wryly apt considering the landscape being seen), and the pieces do try to look beyond official accounts of place to draw on tiny concrete details, lived experience, historical perspective, technical boating matters, economics, and so on and so forth. Of course, unless you note everything, the very act of selecting details unflattens them, making (to mix my spatial metaphors horribly) salient features out of what had been background trifles. Similarly, the alphabetical ordering of the pieces is a way of insisting on the ‘non-hierarchical’ approach; I think Matless wouldn’t object if you read them in a random order, as if you were yourself wandering around the Broads, making your own way.

Matless is a geographer, and the introduction does frame the pieces as ‘geographical descriptions,’ but anyone coming to the discipline without a prior knowledge of cultural geography would be amazed by the lack of a ‘neutral’/’objective’ voice, lack of argumentative rigour and even of argument, and lack of traditional academic apparatus such as referencing. Of course, the move away from that rather chimerical lifebelt is one of the characteristic and exciting features of the contemporary cultural geographer.

What is this blog about ?

Cultural Geography featured on the now-ex Pilot GCSE Geography Specification - that was my introduction to this area of geography. This blog started out featuring my findings, resources and images as I produced resources when teaching this unit for the first time. Some readers may disagree with what I call 'cultural geography' but I'm still relatively new to all this...

Some of the early content stems from ideas by Dr. Phil Wood , Senior Lecturer in Geographical Education at the University of Leicester.

The blog has now morphed into a general place to blog about geography and popular culture, as well as social science, mapping and a range of other cultural items of interest.